The problem with philanthropy . . .

This article at gawker (http://gawker.com/5657220/ivy-league-schools-are-the-worlds-worst-charity) speaks to something that has been bugging me for awhile. This piece questions the wisdom of a $100 million dollar gift to Columbia's Business school (for adding space - not scholarships) as something that is truly worthy of being called philanthropy or charity.

While most of the comments focus on gifts to Ivy League institutions, my thoughts have been more focused on things like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet's "Billionaire's Pledge Club" where billionaires pledge to give more than 50% of their wealth to charity. This has gotten lots of good press and suggests that so much good will inevitably flow from these acts.

I guess I am just a wee bit cynical. While Bill Gates may know how to dominate the operating system market and Buffett may know how to invest money in stocks and bonds, I guess I am less optimistic that they know how to solve complex social and political problems. While choice is generally good, I am not sure why we should be thrilled when people are making choices in areas about which they are fairly ignorant or at least don't have a history of success. As economists have pointed out, consumers make good choices when faced with choices they regularly make (e.g. buying toilet paper) but generally don't do so well when faced with once in a lifetime decisions (e.g. picking a college or picking a heart surgeon). If Philanthropists are dedicated (like Gates), perhaps they become good decision-makers over time. But, it is not clear to me when or who their professionally honed judgment gets transferred to this new realm.

Even if billionaires can train themselves to become good decision-makers in this realm, this leads to the democracy problem. As individuals or their charities gain so much wealth, they gain the power to substituted their judgment for the majority. In other words, philanthropy is profoundly anti-democratic because an individual or relatively small and unaccountable group can determine which social problems, or in the case of Columbia what majors/buildings, will be fixed and improved.

Is philanthropy a good thing? If my arm was twisted, I would probably say it is. However, I guess I am not quite ready to strain myself in congratulating these folks until I am more confident that they are making good choices and folks can hold them accountable for their decisions.

Where Have all the Dangerous Ideas Gone?

I have been thinking a lot about banned books and the world of ideas lately.

Recently, I participated in Drury's Banned Book Celebration by reading a selection from Toni Morrison's Beloved. In reviewing the list of "Banned" Books, I noticed that relatively few books have been banned outright in recent years in that it was illegal to sell them.

Rather, the battle has turned to school curricula. Many books have become part of the curriculum wars, mostly for mentioning "forbidden" topics or words. Rarely if at all was the actual message or thesis of the book the problem.

Just today, I read the heart-breaking story of Risha Mullins at http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/wtf/comments/dmzok/9b52fde5785125f3a0ebc44caca66852.html. She was accused of promoting "soft pornography" because the award-winning books she had chosen for students dealt with "dangerous" topics. As her blog outlines, Mullins ultimately lost her job but she stood tall for the idea that students should read books that matter. (Similar battles have been fought in the areas outside of Springfield, including Republic and Stockton)

For one of my classes tomorrow, I will be teaching Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." It is a great essay but one that will, I suspect, perplex my students because he was willing to go to jail rather than violate the dictates of his conscience by supporting the state.

All these things seem to inform or set the context of the recent national conversation about higher education and the many ideas to change or abolish tenure. In a commentary posted at chronicle.com, Cary Nelson (the president of the AAUP) argues in support of tenure largely on the practical reason that parents should want their children educated by full-time professionals who devote their complete energy to teaching a reasonable amount of classes and have the employment safety to experiment with teaching and delve deeply into their subject matter. (See http://chronicle.com/article/Parents-Your-Children-Need/124776/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en) As a tenured faculty member, I am pretty partial to Nelson's argument (regardless of some of its flaws). The comments to the article echo, however, the broader national conversation that questions the competence of teachers and cost of tenure.

What links all of these topics for me is that feeling that ideas have lost their power. Tenure was created at a moment in U.S. history when holding the wrong idea was scandalous and was connected with a form of treason. Nonetheless, everyone agreed that colleges and universities were in the "idea" business. Thoreau, a national literary treasure, went to jail on principle.

Somehow, I doubt that contemporary Americans take ideas that seriously. Certainly, the critics of higher education and tenure seem to suggest that colleges and universities ought to get out of the business of reflection and ideas and more involved in practical skills training. Many defenders of tenure, I think, have missed that the real attack is not so much on the employment practices of higher education but the entire purpose of the modern university. If professors are "just" teaching job skills, then there are no dangerous ideas and tenure is not needed or so the argument appears in the mainstream media.

Risha Mullins may be the exception to this general picture, but one that proves the general rule. She lost her job because she thought education should be about ideas. While a number of authors lined up behind her, most of her colleagues did not or if they did, it was not in the way that Thoreau would have suggested. Rather, her critics associated with her controversial topics and succeeded in getting her removed.

I worry about all these things because I fear that we are forgetting how powerful ideas have rocked the world. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions transformed societies and toppled monarchies. The invention of monotheism and the prophesies of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad have inspired religious traditions and caused tremendous wars.

Ideas don't seem to scandalize anyone these days. No one objected or was outraged at Drury's Banned Book Celebration. Sure, we might object to kids hearing dirty or inappropriate words, but ideas seem to be some sort of quaint artifacts of an earlier, more naive period. Rather than having revolutionary potential, we view ideas as forms of intellectual property we can accumulate or leverage for more stuff.

While I don't want to return to the Spanish Inquisition or the Communist Scare of the 1950s, I am saddened by how ideas don't seem to matter. I suppose I could now begin ranting about the evils of commercialism and consumerism and how economics has trumped everything else, but that may not be the real problem. Postmodernists, post-structuralists, and post-colonial thinkers were so successful in undermining the grand narratives and big ideas that modernity brought us that we no longer believe in anything. As a supporter of many of these positions, I do believe their criticisms were necessary to create a more democratic society. Unfortunately, their/my attack on ideas and idealism has been too successful and now we are all postmoderns whether we want to be or not. And all that may be left is shopping or the consumption of our niche goods.

I am looking for that one scandalous idea that will cause sufficient outrage to restore our faith in ideas and their power.